Systems design and implementation with jerk-optimized trajectory generation for UAV calligraphy

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Chinese calligraphy seem like two completely unrelated subjects in today’s world. UAV, as one of the most advanced technology to date, has gathered much attention lately due to its potentially unlimited applications. Contrarily, Chinese calligraphy is one of the most beautiful and ancient calligraphy art originally developed from China few thousand years ago. Today in this manuscript, we present to you the art of autonomous calligraphy writing with UAVs. The proposed UAV calligraphy system is able to trace the user handwritten inputs, and then execute the writing by mimicking the user handwriting with four autonomous UAVs. This manuscript details the design considerations and implementation process of such a system. The UAV calligraphy system was performed in Singapore Airshow 2014. Robustness and reliability of the system has been well tested, and high performance can be seen from the resulting calligraphy writing.